Brigadeir–oh! J
Phone: Website: Opening hours: Children: Disabled: The bill: Would you go back? UST recently, T and I went on our annual trip to Portugal, staying as usual in the delightful Quinta Do Lago. It’s the only time of year we get to hit a few golf balls about the place (we both played quite well, thank you), and the weather is generally warm and sunny, making a change from the biting cold and miserable gloom that we’re suffering from over here.
I’m very much in favour of going somewhere familiar for a holiday once a year, be it in this country or abroad. That’s why we owned a house in the Aveyron for so many years, and are looking to go back there soon.
It’s nice to know you’re on familiar ground; where to pick up the rental car, which roads to take, where the supermarket is. The minute you arrive, you feel like you’re home. It’s all very easy and comfortable, and makes for a much less stressful break, especially if it’s for a fairly short hop.
We had a smashing time, devouring books and enjoying the occasional lie-in, and the food was, as usual, terrific. The Algarve is rightly famous for its fresh fish – we enjoyed wonderful sardines, sole and sea bream amongst others – and there’s great ham and cheeses from the mountains of the interior, along with wonderful sweet oranges from the vast groves that cover the coastal plains.
The Quinta is surrounded by watercress farms, too – and if you check your bag from the local supermarket over here, chances are it was grown in the Algarve.
The wine of Portugal is escalating in quality as more vineyards invest in new equipment and better tanks, though it is now officially an annoyance for me that they insist on using corks instead of the Stelvin caps we’re increasingly becoming used to.
Fair do’s, I suppose; Portugal is the world’s leading producer of cork, so it would seem counterproductive of them to change, but I’m becoming less used to pulling corks these days, and some of them are wedged in there pretty tightly!
The use of stainless steel tanks for white and rosé wines means that the freshness and acidity is so much more apparent in even some of the cheaper bottles, whilst the reds of the Douro and Alentejo are among Europe’s best – big, rounded, fruity beasts with bags of flavour and oakiness.
We enjoyed terrific beef, tender lamb and of course, the famous piri-piri chicken, that sweet, smoky, spicy dish, its origins in the former Portuguese colony of Mozambique, and now a worldrenowned recipe, eaten by millions daily.
Puddings are thin on the ground, it must be said, but there are a few popular sweet treats, and here’s today’s recipe, the famous Brigadeiro cake. Its origins are Brazilian, but it’s become a solid Portuguese icon, a symbol of comfort and sugary satisfaction.
It’s a super-sweet chocolate cake, garnished with chocolate hundreds and thousands, and you’ll find it on almost every dessert menu in the land. I couldn’t find a really satisfactory recipe, so I decided to strike out and make my own version, based on my wife’s wonderful never-fail chocolate cake recipe. The traditional Brigadeiro icing, made with lashings of condensed milk, is incredibly sweet, and I find it a little too much all over the cake, so, with apologies to the Portuguese people, I’m making a slightly less overwhelming buttercream instead, saving the original sweet icing as the filling.